My Vacation, Part 5 of 9 -- Saturday, July 25, 2009

[lblanchard]

First news of the day: Roy thinks he's coming down with a cold. Fortunately, I have a few Cold-Eze.

We had coffee on the porch with Al the Aggregate Guy from Detroit, his wife, and another couple, up for their kids' camp open house. A woman who is canoeing the Susquehanna and delivering art for a festival later this summer is also on the porch. We talk about places to eat. We agree the Wyalusing is not haute cuisine, and canoeist volunteers that there's a wonderful place in Tunkhannock. We heartily recommend the Wyalusing for bar food and rhapsodize about the hamburgers. Al volunteers that his daughter has pronounced herself sick of summer camp's Very Health Whole Foods Cuisine and is dying for a greaseburger, so they're sold. The talk turns to the Marcellus Shale, frac sand, extraction etc. The canoeist is foursquare against it. Al is not sure what he thinks. We talk about new techniques for purifying and re-using the water to minimize the impact on the environment. Roy is pretty knowledgeable about the business of taking the water away in tank cars for processing.

We had breakfast at the Weigh Station again -- Roy was less pleased with the mushroom/provolone omelet of the first day and I was less pleased with the grilled pepper, spinach and feta omelet. But we were satisfied. I also got some pictures of the charming River Walk and some of Towanda's earlier historic buildings.

Coming across the bridge to Towanda on the way to breakfast, I was struck at how lovely the town looked from the bridge. So we drove back over the bridge. Roy let me out and headed for the little riverside park on the Wysox side, thinking perhaps to do a little forensic railroading. I walked out to the middle of the Susquehanna, snapping as I went. Railroad tracks -- snap! Ailanthus in bloom -- snap! Little park -- snap! Lovely waters -- snap! Townscape -- snap! snap! snap! snap! Flowerboxes on the separator between the roadway and the walkway -- snap! Attempt at doing something artsy with petunias in the foreground and the view over the other side of the bridge -- fail! I thought about getting into the roadway to try it from the other direction but decided I value my life.

When I returned to the pickup point, Roy wanted to show me several good views from the little park. He was right -- the best rear shot of the courthouse was to be had from the park. I also grabbed a couple record-purpose shots of flowers growing in a wild zone, including some beautiful white teasels. This reminded me that I hadn't yet started a flower census, so I did so and will put it in an appendix. On the way out we got a shot of a demented little garden done by the auto repair facility on the way to the park -- flowers planted in the engine bay of an old truck..

Roy wanted to go to the Pennsylvania Lumber Museum today. I would have preferred to go on Sunday, but he was really eager. When we got to the entrance it was totally clogged by guys with bows and arrows! There was some sort of traditional archery roundup in the park across the way. We aren't big on braving the crowds, so we decided to go elsewhere. Turning around, we had lunch at the Sylvania Restaurant west of Galeton. The food was….nourishing. Roy had a grilled ham and swiss. I had an interesting interpretation of a cheese steak sub. American cheese, cubed steak, soft roll. We also had ice cream.

Everyone in the place except us seemed to know each other. Hilda the waitress was greeted by an older man - turns out she had worked for him when she was in high school. We were seated next to a big faux rock display with a stuffed cougar and a stuffed bobcat. Seen from the proper angle, the cougar seemed to be stalking a fellow and his son who were playing some sort of video game at the counter. Hilda explained that the restaurant's owner was a big game hunter. The cats were from Idaho, and the other stuffed and mounted things in the dining room were from African safaris. The fellow at the next table over assured us that the archers hadn't overrun the Lumber Museum, and that there was parking reserved for Lumber Museum patrons. Besides, he added, there was a nice glass show there. So we ate our lunches and departed.

The fellow at the next table was right -- the museum wasn't overrun with archers. It was, however, overrun with glass vendors, who had set up table top displays in front of the exhibits and who eyed us hungrily as potential patrons. The woman who took our money told us we had reduced admission for the day because of the glass show and we thought we'd overpaid. We couldn't see much for the glass, and the hopeful, pleading looks from the vendors, who obviously weren't getting a lot of business, were seriously offputting.


Happily, the exhibit we really wanted to see was in another building. This housed the Shay Engine, a geared locomotive that can handle steeper grades than a standard engine, and the Barnhart's Log Loader, a remarkable steam-powered contraption that sat on rails on top of a railroad car and loaded logs into the car. Many photographs were taken here and at the other buildings showing replica bunkhouses, dining cabins, stables, carpenter's and blacksmith's shops, etc. If it hadn't started to rain, we could have seen the sawmill too. Perhaps another trip…


While looking at the Barnhart, I invented a new photographic technique. Using the gorillapod to secure the camera to the end of my walking stick, setting the camera for flash and a 10 second time delay, I was able to thrust my makeshift contraption through cab windows, guesstimate a good angle and wait for the flash. What the heck -- pixels are cheap. We finished up at another building with an exhibition on tanning and a small "Brookville" engine. I found a blue bellyflower that I haven't yet identified, but it looks like one of the Scrophularidae to me. Or maybe mint.


Returning to Galeton we drove around the lake, noting the church that is enjoying adaptive reuse as the Lakeside Cinema, with Harry Potter as the featured attraction. We decided to take a ride over the hills to nearby Germania. As we climbed, it got rainier and foggier and we were secretly grateful that the car in front of us was going very slowly, creeping along at 15 mph when the rain was coming down in sheets and the visibility was just a few yards. I was taken by the ramshackle Germania Hotel, which was apparently hosting a biker party.


[Photo: cabin at Ox Yoke in, not ours, also not in sequence.] Back in Galeton again, we checked in at the Ox Yoke Motel. No broadband in the rooms, they told us, but there was abundant broadband in the dining room and in the bar and we were welcome to come up and use it. The charming cabins and motel blocks were located just a wee bit above Pine Creek and well below the level of the roadhouse. When we opened our room door we discovered there was no closet, only one lamp, scant pillows, and the most evil, back-unfriendly headboard it's ever been my misfortune to try to lean up against. The décor was decidedly peculiar -- semigloss white walls and a scalloped wallpaper border of some very dark flowered pattern at the top of the walls. But the place didn't smell bad, so we shrugged and turned on the air conditioner.

For the next two days we were unable to dry out the room. The temperature was at that unfortunate mid 60s point where the compressor wouldn't kick in no matter how high we turned up the air conditioning.

It was better in the bar, which is where we ate. Actually, we ate at a booth in the bar area. We loved our bartender, Melissa, who is from Doylestown and who makes a pretty good Manhattan despite not being able to find a drop of bitters in the place. How'd you wind up here?, we asked her. She explained that when she and her husband eloped and announced it to her in-laws, her father-in-law immediately offered them 37 acres in Tioga County. Roy enjoyed his cedar plank salmon and garlic potatoes. I gorged on a "taco burger," which was basically a cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato and salsa, plus a side order of nacho chips. The nacho sauce was Tostitos dip from the jar, I think, which is basically Cheez wiz and jalapeños, but I thought it was mighty tasty. We also had the dessert special, homemade chocolate cream cheese cake with ice cream and chocolate sauce.

Then it was back to the room and a night of sleeping badly. My little Asus turns out not to be powerful enough to charge two camera batteries at the same time so I needed to move batteries around in the middle of the night, having drained them both. I didn't need to set an alarm, though -- I was enough that I believe I woke up every fifteen minutes through most of the night.

[There are 52 photos from July 25, beginning here. All entries from this vacation are tagged "anniversary trip."]